Heart Breaking
by Sariasprincy
Summary: Sakura works later as she tried to save a dying patient, but what makes this one different from the rest? This new case makes Sakura see what could happen to her, but Itachi always manages to comfort her. ItaSaku. Non massacre


**(A/N: Sorry for the delayed update!! Please forgive me, but I think this is good enough to make it up.**

**Disclaimer: I do NOT own Naruto and other characters)**

**Please note: This story was a themed challenge. But I've had a change of plans. Please read my profile for further information.**

* * *

**Heart Breaking  
Theme Number 24: No Time **

The screeching of a monitor made nurses jump to life. They began barking out orders and pushing family and friends out of the patient's room as the heart monitor continued to draw a neon green line across the screen. Worried voices, hurried footsteps, and the clinking of medical instruments echoed down the white hallways of Konoha hospital, disturbing the peace that had settled momentarily on the third floor.

"She's jaundicing, Dr. Haruno!" a nurse called out.

Sakura took in the female patient's yellowing skin and yelled out into the hall: "She needs to be put on dialysis. Get a machine in here stat!"

Nurses jumped to life at her outburst and two raced out of the room to get the machine Sakura requested. The others began either pushing the unconscious shinobi's hospital bed away from the wall or pulling paddles out of a drawer to restart her heart. A nurse, Sakura knew by the name of Mai, handed her the yellow and silver paddles.

"Charging 200. Clear!" Sakura called. She placed the paddles on her chest and pressed the button on the side, making the bolts of electricity run through her heart to restart it.

Nothing.

"Charging 300. Clear!" Sakura said again. She sent the bolts into the unconscious shinobi again. Her body jumped at the shock before falling still once more.

"Charging 360. Clear!" the kunoichi spoke.

The shock went straight to her heart and made her body jump. She prepared herself to recharge the paddles, but the slow beeping of the heart monitor caught her attention and made her freeze. Sakura's head snapped up and she watched the once straight line start to make neon ridges on the screen. Everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath as if daring the mini mountains to fall into a constant line once more, but Mai placed a finger to the patient's neck and nodded at Sakura. "We've got a steady pulse."

A small sigh of relief escaped the awaiting family and friends outside along with some of the nurses, but Sakura looked around the room with a glare. She needed to get her patient stable so she could leave and think of what could have caused her condition. When Sakura spoke, her voice anything but relieved: "Where's my Hemodialysis machine?"

"Here!" Shizune said. She raced into the room with two nurses pulling a big machine behind them. Sakura immediately stood back as unneeded medical officers left the room. "We've got this, Sakura," the black-haired woman said. She seemed to sense Sakura's want to leave so she could think on the shinobi's case. "I'll let you know if anything happens."

Sakura nodded and left the room. She headed for her office in silence, ignoring the curious stares people sent her way as she passed them. Her mind was too fixed on the diseases and bacteria that could have caused her condition. There were over a million different diseases and thousands of bacterial infections in the world. How was she to figure out how to solve this before her patient died?

A frustrated sigh escaped Sakura's lips as she entered her office and turned on the light. She walked over to her desk and sat down. Immediately, she noticed her patient's open file and automatically her eyes trained t themselves on a picture of the pretty, brown-haired, brown eyed, twenty-two-year-old kunoichi. The picture of the girl looked so much prettier than the girl dying in the hospital bed down the hall.

Her name read Kato Akira. She looked so happy and beautiful in the photo it made Sakura's heart ache to see the condition she was in now. But her mind was distracted when she saw the flashing light of her answering machine. Bright red numbers were blinking, telling her she had four missed calls.

Curious, Sakura hit the play button and began to listen. The first three messages were all blank, telling her that Itachi, her boyfriend of two years, had called and got impatient. Then the fourth message started:

'_Sakura, you told me you wouldn't work late. You've been there for almost ten hours now. You told me you were going to be home by noon; it's now four,' _Itachi paused and let out a small sigh, telling her that he was annoyed. _'Just…come home soon.'_

Sakura listened to the message end as she watched the rain hit her window angrily. It rattled the glass some, but her mind was too scrambled with conditions and Itachi that she didn't really care that it was pouring outside.

A soft sigh escaped her lips when she remembered Itachi only left her voicemails if he was getting worried or impatient, but she guessed it was the later of the two; he had left the message almost forty-five minutes ago. She was tempted to pick up the phone and call him, but if she did that, she knew he would talk her into leaving work and coming home and she couldn't do that. If she didn't get thinking soon, her patient would be dead by midnight.

With a long sigh, Sakura reread Akira's medical history and began taking notes on the information she knew so far: Akira's heart and kidneys were failing. She was jaundicing and every medication they gave her either put her in a seizure or killed her. What could cause her symptoms and put her in her condition?

Sakura leaned back in her chair and pinched the bridge of her nose as she tried to think. It seemed like the answer was right in front of her face, but too far away for her to see yet and the sudden opening of her door sent the thought further away until it was lost in the dark corners of her mind. "Dr. Haruno," a nurse poked her head in.

"Yes?" she snapped.

"I got the results for Akira's toxscreen back from the lab," she said slowly.

Sakura immediately became interested and turned her sights from her notes and file to the nervous looking woman standing at the door. When the nurse didn't make any move to say or do anything she barked: "Can I see them _please_?"

The blonde haired woman jumped before she slowly approached Sakura's desk and set the papers in her hand. The pink-haired kunoichi looked them over as the nurse left her office and as she read line after line, she found no problem until one word on the page sent a sharp jolt through her: _poison_.

Immediately Sakura jumped up and raced back to her patient's room. The family looked up at her in surprise and watched her cautiously as she pulled a small syringe from a drawer. Sakura walked over to Akira's right side and stuck the needle into her chest.

"What are you doing?" a male Sakura's age snapped.

Sakura didn't look up as she continued to take blood out straight from the heart and she replied with a monotonous voice: "Your girlfriend has been injected with a poison on her latest mission. I'm going to take some of her blood and filter it out."

"Are you going to make an antidote? Will she live?" a woman in her mid-fifties asked.

Sakura carefully pulled the needle from her chest and looked at the man and woman. "I'm going to do what I can." Then she walked out of the hospital room and made for the lab.

* * *

It was nearing six in the evening when Sakura finally got the poison back from the lab. She watched the red liquid swirl around gracefully in the small tube it was contained in and she couldn't help but stare at it in distaste. Whoever made this poison, made it just the right color and texture so it would be hard to notice once it was in the bloodstream.

Sakura watched the ruby color sway as she made her way down to the lab. Her footsteps echoed lightly down the hall and she felt fully awake, whether it from the nervousness of keeping her patient alive or from the guilt and regret she felt about not being home with Itachi when she had promised she would or it being a combined feeling of both. Her mind was too swamped with everything to think clearly and she realized the faster she figured out the problem, the faster she could save her patient and be with Itachi.

The door to the lab opened soundlessly as Sakura stepped through. She found herself as the only one inside and realized everyone else had most likely gone home. But she didn't think on it as she entered the backroom and walked to the back counter where they kept all of the lab mice. Carefully, Sakura placed her poison down on the counter before she dressed herself to appropriate experimentation attire and pulled a white mouse out of a holding box.

She placed the white creature in another clear box without a lid and filled a small syringe with the poison before she picked up the mouse and stuck it with the red liquid. "Let's see what this poison can do," she murmured softly.

She waited until all the poison was in the rat's system before she turned and placed him in a different box with a lid. She needed to keep him on his own until she could see what exactly the poison did. For all she knew, the poison could just be the thing killing her kidneys and could have nothing to do with the heart failure or the other way around.

A sudden loud bang echoed in the room and knocked Sakura out of her thoughts as the door was thrown open. Sakura spun around to see Mai was standing at the entrance panting like she had run the whole way. "Thank Kami I found you. You-your patient is vomiting blood."

Sakura froze. "What?"

She didn't waste a moment. She threw her goggles and apron down as she ran out of the room. Mai was hot on her heels as they sped around the corner and entered the room Akira was residing in. She was leaning over her bedside throwing up mouthfuls of blood at a time. Sakura watched as the red liquid splashed and stained the white tiles of the room crimson.

Sakura and the few nurses in the room stood back to wait for her to finish. She hated standing there, not being able to do anything, but there was nothing she could do. In cases like this, there was nothing to do but wait. The sound of her mom cries outside her room wasn't helping them get through it any easier either.

It felt like hours had passed by the time Akira had stopped vomiting. Sakura and the others immediately rushed her to the emergency room afterwards and cut her open to find the problem. The sight that met their eyes when they opened her stomach shocked Sakura; she had helicobacter pylorus near the entrance to the large intestine and stomach cancer.

Sakura stared at the gruesome sight before her, but she eventually looked away and turned her sights to Shizune, "There's too much cancer to remove."

"I know," Shizune mumbled, her eyes fixed on the shinobi's stomach. Then they drifted up to meet Sakura's. "What are we going to do?"

She sighed. "There's nothing we can do," she said quietly before she exited the room and slowly approached the awaiting family.

At the sight of the pink-haired doctor, Akira's boyfriend and mother, Kana, both jumped up and stared at Sakura with so much hope it made her heart hurt.

"How is she?" her boyfriend asked.

Sakura took a breath. "She has stomach cancer. It was caused by a bacterial infection called helicobacter pylorus."

Her mom stared back at Sakura in confusion. "What is that?"

"It's a bacterium that infects the stomach and the first section of the large intestine. It attacks the protective tissue in the stomach and weakens in, which is part of the reason why she has stomach cancer," Sakura explained slowly.

Kana shook her head in confusion. "Part of the reason?"

"Well helicobacter pylorus can cause stomach cancer, but it's extremely rare. With Akira's condition, the helicobacter pylorus wouldn't be enough to fully cause the cancer," Sakura said. She watched the worry and horror flicker through the woman's eyes and she could tell she was doing everything she could not to burst into tears. "Is there anything Akira could have done to help cause this? Smoking? Drinking? Drugs? Anything you can think of?"

Akira's boyfriend looked over at the mom for a moment before he spoke: "She quit smoking about six months ago. She said it was slowing her down on her ninja training so she gave it up."

"She smoked?" Kana asked, her eyes wide in horror.

Kenji sighed and gave the older woman a guilty look. "She didn't want you to know."

Kana's mouth hung open slightly in shock before she glared at the male. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"She told me not to. She said it was her choice and you didn't need to know," he murmured quietly.

"No," the older woman murmured as she lowered herself down onto a chair. "I don't believe you."

"Excuse me," Sakura nodded politely at them before she turned to walk away. She had only taken a few steps when Akira's boyfriend spoke: "Why didn't you surgically remove the stomach cancer?"

Sakura stopped and looked at him over her shoulder for a long moment. "Because if we removed the cancer, there wouldn't be enough stomach left." Then she walked down the hall in the direction of her office.

* * *

A long sigh escaped Sakura's lips as she reentered the lab and walked into the back room where she had left the poison. Sakura was about to grab the tube of red liquid off the counter, but stopped when she saw the mouse she had injected the poison with was still breathing. His eyes were jaundiced, but his heart was still pumping and giving him life.

"That's not possible," Sakura whispered, as she grabbed a stethoscope and held it against the rat's chest. His heart wasn't only beating—it was beating normally.

At once Sakura placed the rat back in the bin and grabbed the poison before heading out of the room. She made for her office and closed the door behind her before she sat behind her desk and reread Akira's file.

The poison didn't match up for their symptoms and she didn't understand why. The mouse only had kidney failure while Akira had kidney and heart failure. If it was true that the poison only caused kidney failure, then what was causing Akira's heart failure? There had to be a piece of the puzzle Sakura was missing. It didn't make sense and was completely impossible for the poison to have different effects on different organisms. Poison didn't work like that.

'_Unless something happened to Akira's heart before the poison got to her,'_ Sakura thought. She scanned the file on the female shinobi and stopped when she saw Akira had been complaining about a mid migraine a couple days ago.

Sakura felt her heart lurch at that thought and her breath hitched when she finally understood what was going on. Akira had a headache and what do people do when they have headaches? They take medicine. Her kidneys failed and they couldn't process the medicine she had taken. It went into the bloodstream and went straight to her heart. She had killed herself.

"No," Sakura murmured. She continued to stare blankly at the file as the information repeated in her mind. Her patient was dying. Her patient killed herself. Her patient wasn't going to live. Her patient would be dead within a few minutes once they took her off dialysis. She was going to die no matter what she or Tsunade or Shizune or anyone else did.

She had failed.

* * *

Sakura walked down the emptying hallway silently as she listened to the quiet murmuring of family taking their leave and the constant beeping of heart monitors. Everything seemed to blend into background noise as Sakura became too caught up in her numbness to pay attention to where she was going. She had wanted answers and she had gotten them, but she didn't like them.

Her patient was barely holding onto life and she knew that they would have to keep Akira on dialysis until the poison had been completely rinsed from her blood and she could get a kidney transplant, but sense she also had stomach cancer, her name would be pumped down to the middle of the list. By the time they received kidneys to transplant for her, the helicobacter pylorus would already cause too much damage for any doctor—no matter if it were she or Tsunade.

That realization sent a sharp pain to Sakura's heart and she felt like she had let everyone down. She was responsible for this woman's life. She was supposed to make her be able to go home again. She was supposed to rid her of any disease. She was supposed to make her well of any illness. She was supposed to save her, but she couldn't and it was all her fault for not realizing it sooner. She was now responsible for the family's grief and she was the one that had to tell them that their loved one was going to die. Sakura was stuck in a nightmare that she couldn't wake up from. It was called reality.

At the sight of Sakura, both Kana and Kenji stood. The hope shining in their eyes made Sakura's break into two pieces and she could already feel the grief they were about to be consumed with. The faith in their expressions quickly fell when Sakura offered them no words of hope.

"I'm sorry," Sakura said. "There's nothing we can do."

Kana stared at Sakura for a moment as she let her words sink in and when they did she broke down into tears and a harsh sob escaped her lips. Akira's boyfriend held the older woman as she cried and he looked up at Sakura with a pained expression. Sakura felt her heart clench in sympathy, but she didn't dare let it consume her for she knew she would start to cry as well.

"We can keep Akira on dialysis until a kidney is available for her," Sakura said slowly, "but with her condition that could take a year and even after that we'll have to treat her for her helicobacter pylorus. It's treatable and there are multiple medicines that work, but-."

"I'll sign whatever papers you need; give them to her," Kana interrupted quickly.

Sakura paused and when she spoke, her voice was soft and quiet: "With her condition, she can't."

"What?" her mom asked. "Why not?"

"With Akira's kidney failure, giving her the medicine would have her body shut down and there's a high chance she wouldn't make it through the next attack," she spoke as softly as she could even though telling them was ripping her heart into shreds. "Like I was saying, we can keep Akira on dialysis until a kidney can be donated and then we can treat her infection, but she'd have to come to the hospital for a week once a month for the rest of her life."

Kana let out another sob as Kenji looked at Sakura and shook his head. "She-she would hate that. She's never liked hospitals. I think she'd rather…" he trailed off as the tears that were brimming in his eyes finally fell in quiet streams.

Sakura nodded once. "Would you like to talk to her one last time?"

They nodded simultaneously before she led them over to Akira's room. Quietly Sakura slid the door open and walked in. The only sound she could hear was the constant turning of the Hemodialysis machine and her heart monitor. Sakura felt as if the noise was mocking her and telling her that she failed, but she tried to ignore the sounds as she walked up to Akira's bedside and placed a chakra-laced hand to her head to wake her up for the last time.

A deep sigh escaped Akira's lips as she opened her brown eyes. Immediately her family raced to her side before her mother grabbed one of her hands. Sakura moved down to her stomach to keep the pain at bay, but as her hand traced down her stomach her eyes widened.

"Hey baby," her boyfriend murmured.

"Hey," she murmured back.

Kana silently cried as she kissed her daughter's limp hand. "Akira, I love you. I want you to know that I love you more than anything else in the world."

Akira stared at her mom in confusion before her eyes turned to her boyfriend's pain expression. Then they fell on Sakura. "Am I dying?"

No one answered her. Then Kenji kissed her cheek. Sakura saw a tear fall from Akira's face as she realized what was going on. She didn't say anything, she just cried, as did her family. Sakura's vision blurred with unshed tears, but she refused to let them fall. She had to remain strong for the family and Akira.

The only sound in the room was "I love you," which was repeated out of her boyfriend's mouth constantly and the soft crying of her mother and the quiet humming of Sakura's chakra as it made Akira's body numb.

Sakura hated to tell the family that it was time, but her chakra was wavering from working all day and if they didn't let her go now she would die painfully. "It's time," she said quietly.

Everyone in the room glanced at Sakura before they turned back to Akira. Tears fell faster and harsh sobs began racking Kana's body once more. Her boyfriend gripped Akira's hand so tightly, it was going white, while Sakura slowly reached out with one hand and flipped the switch off for the dialysis to stop.

The quiet mechanical murmuring came to a halt and after a second Akira's eyes grew heavier. She gave her family one last smile as she spoke quietly: "Will you smile for me one last time?"

Another sob fell from Kana's mouth before she did the best she could of giving her daughter one last smile. Tears fell down Kenji's face as he took a deep breath and gave her an award-winning grin, but it was forced and Sakura could tell the effort was killing him.

A soft sigh escaped Akira's lips before she closed her eyes. "Now I can go."

She let out a soft sigh as the heart monitor let out a screech, telling them the line was dead and before Sakura could stop her flow of chakra, it flickered and died out as she ran out. Silently she walked up to the screen to silence the wailing machine. A harsh cry escaped the older woman's lips and she laid halfway on top of her daughter's body as she sobbed out her despair. Sakura felt her heart lurch and she glanced up at the clock before she walked over to the clipboard at the foot of Akira's bed. _'Time of death: 11:13,'_ she thought.

Then Sakura exited the room, letting the nurses take over as they ushered the family out of the room so they could cover the body. She hurried down the empty hall and rounded the corner to make sure no one saw her before she pressed her back against the wall and wrapped her arms around herself. She made a quick glance around to make sure she was alone before she sank to the floor and let her tears flow. Her heart hurt and a lump sat at the bottom of her stomach as she cried her eyes out silently.

The quiet thumping of the rain on the window in front of her seemed to mourn with her, but it didn't comfort Sakura—it did the opposite—and she cried until the sobs were racking her body and she could barely breath. Her head was pounding from the pressure the constant flow of tears caused, but she didn't stop; she couldn't.

"Sakura?" a soft voice called.

Immediately Sakura's head snapped up and she found Shizune standing over her, glancing down at her worriedly. Once she saw how Sakura was, she knelt down to be at her level and gave her a questioning and concerned look: "What happened?"

"I killed my patient," Sakura said, as she tried to even out her breathing. "I could have saved her. I should have known that her kidney failure had nothing to do with her heart failure and that she had stomach cancer and-."

"Sakura, stop," Shizune said firmly. "You've lost patients before. What happened?"

Sakura took a deep breath and gave Shizune a helpless look. "She…never mind," she murmured, looking away. "I-I'm just stressed."

Shizune gave Sakura an understanding look before she wrapped her arms around her and helped her stand up. "Go home, Sakura. You've been here for two shifts. Take tomorrow off and the next day; I'll tell Tsunade-sama."

Sakura nodded numbly as Shizune let go of her and walked through the halls in the direction of the changing room. As if from a distance, Sakura took off her white lab coat and changed back into the clothes she was wearing this morning. Her mind didn't seem to register anything as she laced up her shinobi boots and placed her medical shoes inside her locker before she closed it and walked down the hallway in the direction of her office.

When she entered, everything was how she left it. It felt like nothing had changed and she hadn't done anything. She had done everything, but in the end it meant nothing.

A deep sigh escaped Sakura's lips as she closed the file on Kato Akira and turned off her desk lamp. She hit the power button for her computer monitor and as she was about to pick up her bag and the file and head home, she saw her answering machine light was blinking again. She had seven missed calls.

'_Itachi…'_ she thought as another lump formed in her stomach. Her tears were fighting to surface once more as she realized she still had someone waiting for her, where Kenji no longer did. He was alone and she wasn't. It was hard for Sakura to swallow when she thought of how she'd feel if she didn't have Itachi waiting at home for her anymore and an uneven sigh escaped her lips.

Slowly, she stood and grabbed her bag and the file on her deceased patient before she walked out of her office and headed home. The walk in the rain would be a welcomed journey.

* * *

The moment Sakura entered the house she and Itachi lived in, she hear the quiet shuffling of Itachi. Her heart throbbed painfully in her chest as she realized he had stayed up to wait for her and tears threatened to fall from her eyes. Her bag was placed on the floor as Itachi came out of the den, but she didn't say a word as he walked up to her. A slightly annoyed glint in his eyes told her he was expecting an explanation, but before he could open his mouth, she leaned her forehead against his chest and grabbed his shirt as she cried silently.

"I'm sorry," she finally sobbed. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. I'm sorry," she continued to cry over and over.

Itachi stared at her. He showed his confusion by slightly tilting his head. "What?"

"I didn't mean to keep you waiting," Sakura explained so quickly she was stumbling over her words. "I would have called you, but my patient was dying and I couldn't figure out why and I didn't do it in time and she died and I-."

"Sakura slow down," Itachi said calmly. He waited until her breathing evened out and her words weren't muffled by harsh sobs. "Now tell me what's wrong?"

"I tried so hard to save her," Sakura said slowly, as she continued to grip handfuls of his shirt, "but I couldn't do." She gave a small sob. "I couldn't save her."

Itachi pulled her close so she could bury her face him the crook of his neck. "Why are you so emotional about this?" he whispered gently.

Sakura's grip on his shirt tightened. "She was pregnant."

Itachi didn't say anything as he helped guide her up the stairs to their shared bedroom. Sakura felt numb as she changed into one of Itachi's shirts and a pair of his boxers. She took some comfort in his scent and when she lied down on their bed Itachi wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him tightly.

"It'll be different for us, Sakura. Our baby will be fine," he whispered in her ear before he kissed her cheek.

Sakura just gave him a slight nod, too overwhelmed to say anything as she let herself be consumed by his natural scent.

She was glad she still had Itachi waiting for her and ready to comfort her if need be. If she didn't, she wouldn't know what she'd do.

* * *

**(A/N: Sorry for not updating. I've been really busy with school and volleyball and stuff so yeah. Please review.**

**I hope to get another chapter of Angel Child up within the next 2 weeks at the latest. I'm kind of at a writers block moment, but it should pass quickly (they usually do).**

**So yeah, sorry about the wait!!**

**P.S. This chapter reminds me of House haha. (The episode where Amber dies...sad...))**


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